This is a guest post by Tiago Veloso, the founder of Visual Loop, a collaborative digital environment for everything related to information design and data visualization. He lives in Brazil, and you can connect with him online on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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March was an impressive month for all of us that appreciate data visualization, with a great number of fascinating projects being launched (Dataveye’s Metropolitain, MOMA’s Inventing Abstraction, Santiago Ortiz’ Twitter Company Conversations and Out of Sight, Out of Mind, by Pitch Interactive, just to name a few). In visual journalism, it’s also the month of the traditional Malofiej conference, held in the Spanish city of Pamplona. The best infographics and interactive visualizations of 2012 were chosen among hundreds of submitted works (you can have a look at the full list here).

Events like the new Pope election and the death of Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez also led to the production of visualizations by news portals across the globe, many of which we featured on our Interactive Inspiration series.

All of that means that March was an exciting month for us at Visual Loop. We had the pleasure of featuring some fantastic infographic designers in our Portfolio of the Week section, interesting projects being shared through guest posts, and we also welcomed a new regular columnist, the Spanish journalist and media consultant Bernardo Gutiérrez, that will be sharing his thoughts on Open Data visualization, real time and network mapping, among other subjects, in his column Visual Crowd.

So, let’s get to it! Here’s the best of Visual Loop in March.

Featured articles & Cool projects:

Resources, round-ups and selections of visual information goodies, as well as cool data viz projects presented by the authors themselves. Browse around through other news projects featured in March, like this one from Michael Bantung, comparing soccer players salaries with the poorest countries in the world.

Infographic Portfolios:

Every week, a new portfolio from a world-class infographic designer. In March, we had again an assorted assembly of designers being featured on Visual Loop, from Costa Rica, Egypt, India, Brazil and the U.S. Here’s a couple of works from Manuel Canales, an award winning graphic editor at Costa Rica’s main newspaper, La Nación:

Vintage InfoDesign:

On Mondays, we present examples of old maps, charts, diagrams and graphics in what’s becoming a favorite series for our audience. Inspiration from the ‘old days’ of data visualization, that we also shared recently here on Inspired Magazine.

This is Visual Journalism:

Like we mentioned last month, we created a new weekly column named ‘This is Visual Journalism’ – a hand-picked selection of some of the most impressive infographic designs that came to our attention, printed in magazines and newspapers all around the world. One of the editions was dedicated to the print graphics that took home medals from Malofiej21:

Interviews

Brief conversations with people that are a reference in the field of data visualization. In March, we had the pleasure of talking with Manuel Lima, who is, without question, a global reference, when it comes to data visualization. He talked about his website Visual Complexity and the book published two years ago, besides sharing some of his thoughts on the future of data visualization.

If we want this popularity to be more than a temporary trend, data visualization has to mature and develop a critical eye on its own performance, functionality, and influence.

And that’s it for this round-up. Join us on Facebook and Twitter for daily updates about infographics and data visualization. You should also visit our massive Pinterest collection, with thousands of infographics, and we’ll be back next month with the best of Visual Loop.

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About The Author

Tiago Veloso is the founder of Visual Loop, a collaborative digital environment for everything related to information design and data visualization. He lives in Brazil, and you can connect with him online on Twitter and LinkedIn.